Why ASP .NET Core?

Throughout my 2018 mini-series and 2019 A-Z series, I’ve regularly kept up to date on what’s new with ASP .NET Core for building Web Apps, Web APIs and even full-stack C# web applications with Blazor!

With the 2019 release of ASP .NET Core 3.0 and the LTS follow-up ASP .NET Core 3.1, now is still a great time to be an ASP .NET Core developer. But where should you begin? You have many options.

Dev Tools for ASP .NET Core

Visual Studio for Windows: a full-fledged IDE that runs on Windows (or even on Windows on your Mac via Parallels/Bootcamp. Get the latest version to try out new stable ASP .NET features and get the Preview versions to try cool new features. Install just the pieces you need. Start with the free Community edition for students, individuals and open-source projects.

Visual Studio for Mac: build ASP .NET Core applications on a Mac in a full-fledged IDE. VS for Mac can also be used for macOS apps, Xamarin mobile apps for iOS/Android, cloud apps and more!

Blazor App : currently includes only a Blazor Server App template as of v3.1, with client-side Blazor coming soon (2020). You can still use a preview-version of client-side Blazor if you want to experiment with it now.

Note that HTTPS is selected by default and is extremely easy to include in an ASP .NET Core web application, even in a development environment. Optionally, select a Docker environment and Authentication type as appropriate.

When using Visual Studio Code or the dotnet CLI tools, you can create the same project types using CLI commands:

Some additional parameters are dry-run, update-check and update-apply. The parameters and their documented descriptions are listed below:

--dry-run: "Displays a summary of what would happen if the given command line were run if it would result in a template creation."
--update-check: "Check the currently installed template packs for updates."
--update-apply: "Check the currently installed template packs for update, and install the updates."

The options for new project templates are shown below:

dotnet new project templates

Tutorials and Resources

The 2020 A-Z blog series will go into specific topics within ASP .NET Core. In the meantime, check out this list of tutorials and resources to help you get started.

.NET is an open source developer platform, created by Microsoft, for building many different types of applications.
With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT.